The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
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"The train Kiev-Odessa departs from the third platform. We ask escorting citizens to leave the cars."
Needless to make any special point that at those, communicationally underdeveloped, old simple days, even the bravest minds could neither imagine, in however sprightly fantasy flights, nor dream about installation of surveillance cameras in public places. Then, given the conditions of the aforesaid period, what else could cause the ungraspable scene which took place the same evening in the queue of passengers lined at the bus stop in front of the Kiev intercity bus station? There might be solely one reasonable explanation – the vigilance of the taxi driver.
(…the derivative of "reason" here is used without any deeper connotations but in compliance to its since long established core signification, that of correlating the details of surrounding reality in congruence with the linear, orthodoxly perceived, and conventionally evaluated, modifications of the standard cause-effect prototype.
However, at that particular period I was beyond the old-time etiology because of a too deep submergence in tracing and angling up the intricate complexities from the sketchy, haphazardly twined, chain of transcendental symbols and signs of varying significance, confronting me at random flicks of revelations, which goaded to strive and grope with might and main for a new, elusive, but incisive and tantalizingly close level in apprehensive comprehension of the recondite world wrapped in the disguising sham of make-believe reality, so as to find, thru those acumen insights, a firm footing for ensuring my function in general scheme of things if only I would discover it and assess properly because “often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to..” quoting a commendable American transcendentalist…)
Now, back to the taxi driver in the cabstand by the steps to the underground checkroom hall at the Kiev railway station for the trains of long-distance destination… At 17.06 a young man of about twenty-five-to-seven years old, height one-meter seventy-six-to-eight centimeters, with straight brown hair, and a trimmed mustache, emerged from the underground passage. He wore a gray jacket and gray pants, not matching though the shade of gray in the jacket. Noticeably upset about something, the man got into the taxi and suggested the driver go down to the underground hall instead of him, and bring a briefcase and a bag from the indicated automatic storage cell, the code to which he would provide. The driver, naturally, refused.
The dark-haired individual fell into a reverie, twisting a burnt match in the fingers of his right hand, then sighed, broke that match, asked to wait a bit and disappeared down the passage steps. Five minutes later, he appeared again and asked to take him to the intercity bus station. Upon arrival at the specified location, he paid, hung the sports-bag over his left shoulder, gripped the briefcase handle with the same-side hand, and slammed the door. Synchronously and, like, accidentally, he wiped nickel-plated door handle with the right hem of his jacket destroying, by all the canons of criminal films, his fingerprints. After those manipulations, the man disappeared into the entrance to the intercity bus station.
What could the driver do? Of course, he, naturally, called the operative who he was secretly collaborating with, under the operational pseudonym "Tractor".
What was witnessed by the queue of passengers at the bus stop to which I joined coming back from the bus station building, after a visit to the men's toilet and a five-minute pit-stop in the middle of the empty lobby to stare at the multi-square-meter billboard "Fly by the Aeroflot!" with a stewardess wearing her most happy smile and the blue uniform piss-cutter in it?
Nearby the stop, a freshly washed red Zhiguli car pulled up abruptly. A man wearing dark sunglasses got out of it, came up to me and, holding out the ignition key in the bunch with divers other ones, instructed, "Get in the car, we'll go right now."
Keeping mum, I turned away. The man proceeded to the bus station building.
Soon after, 2 young men emerged from behind the right corner of the building—one of them in the militia uniform, the other wearing plainclothes—both of whom took a position on the right off the queue. Round the left corner, the same man in sunglasses came together with a short companion in a thick-fabric cap; they stopped on the other side of the queue. The man in the cap (an obvious scumbag and tipsy as well) mixed with the line of passengers and approached me. He started rubbing against me from behind. The nearest passengers watched in bewilderment.
That disgusting scene was interrupted by the appearance of a bus with the inscription "Polyot" on its side… On the way to the Borispol airport, I did not respond to the puzzled looks of the fellow-travelers, returning with my mental gaze to what had not been recorded by the then-non-existent (and, therefore, absent) surveillance camera in the men's toilet room of the Kiev intercity bus station.
I went up to the sloping trough of the common urinal and poured into it the mustard-brown powder of all the dope I had on me. Then I crumpled its packing sheet of paper and threw it to the trash-bin. The way I was taught by the French criminal movies starring Belmondo.
(…which is the evidence that I can be programmed not only by means of a text but with application of cinematography as well.
In all my life that followed, up to the present night in this forest by the river of Varanda, I stayed straight and strictly abstinent…)
At the airport in Borispol, I didn't use an automatic cell to keep my bag and briefcase, both were left in the baggage room for them to have a shakedown of luggage and see there was no point in rubbing
